Chapter III

Kitty darted past him as the bird flits, apparently without regard to angles and turns. She was a small person, extraordinarily quick and agile, and she seemed to make the flight from the middle of the parlor to the first landing of the staircase in three bounds.

Three more might have taken her to the door of her room on the third floor, but unfortunately there was an obstacle on the landing; a shadowy figure rose with a little frightened cry directly in her path, and there was a sickening crash, two screams, and then two distinct thuds as of small, hard fists landing on something soft.

“Glad—you listened—cat!” panted and gurgled Kitty, as she delivered the blows, and then she swiftly completed her flight without further halt or interruption.

That did not close the episode, however. Doors opened, and startled voices challenged the darkness.

Ottilie Eldom slipped from her room, second floor front, swiftly, like a rather substantial wraith and pounced on the huddled figure on the landing.

“Shut up, hussy!” she hissed softly in Miss Dora Perkins’s ear, and gave her an admonitory cuff, effectively shutting off a wail of anguish.

“Oh, what—what is it?” cried Miss Bascom from her doorway.

“Hey! What’s wrong down there?” rumbled Horace Sheldon from another quarter.

“All right, now!” called back Ottilie Eldom in a cheerful tone. “But who let this cat in anyhow? I nearly broke my neck, getting up the stairs.”

“Hm! Sounded like two cats fighting, when I woke up,” growled Mr. Sheldon.

“Thanks for the pretty compliment, kind sir,” returned Ottilie. “Hope you lie awake till morning, just for that.

“It’s all right, folks!” she added. “You can all go back to bed; but don’t let any more cats into this house hereafter.”

“You’re a cat yourself!” Miss Perkins breathed sibilantly.

“And I scratch. Look out!” returned Ottilie, pushing her roughly aside and mounting the steps to her room.

Miss Perkins, white-faced, with black eyes as large as saucers, descended in her bewilderment to the hall. She stood there, wavering uncertainly, a subtly appealing picture in her pink dressing robe of soft and clinging substance, her little feet tucked into tiny satin slippers. Then:

“Oh, Douglas! You?” she gasped, and swayed alarmingly, catching at the newel post.

“Why—Miss—why, Dora!”

“Oh, I’m scared to death!” she murmured, stealing fearfully, all atremble, into the parlor. “I—I heard voices; I thought there was some trouble. I—it was so foolish—but I started to come down, and—and she—who was it? She struck me! And hurt me, too! Oh, Douglas!”

“Oh, come now, Dora, don’t cry!” he mumbled wretchedly.

“Oh, Douglas!” she sobbed, and melted into his protecting arms.

Then the _Witch of Endor_—impersonated ably by Miss Ottilie Eldom in tousled hair, face flushed with anger, draped in a rumpled bathrobe of dull crimson, appeared again out of the darkness.

“You poor fool!” she muttered savagely.

“Who? Me?” gasped Douglas.

“You!” said Ottilie, scathingly, “and any other man, for that matter. Get upstairs, both o’ you, before I slap you.”